Reuters media chief outlines vision for future news network

Thursday 11 March 2010

Reuters has given a sneak preview of its vision for a future news network that aims to draw on the experience of online social networks.

Project Apollo involves creating a content network that could be both a resource for newspapers requiring specialised information and a means of syndicating their own stories, said Chris Ahearn, president Reuters media, pictured.

“The media is not a one-way street anymore, so why should professional networks be any different from the way the consumers are consuming news?”he said at a conference in Abu Dhabi.

The new project aims to bring together lessons from social media networks and from Thomson Reuters’ primary business of professional information subscriptions.

In the latter realm, the company has learned that “metadata matters”, Ahearn said, referring to the information used to tag and sort media to make it easily searchable. The Apollo project aims to move away from selling clients Thomson Reuters-only products, which “sounds like a very 20th century model to me”, he said.

“What sounds far more interesting to us and our clients is how do we move from a single-source provider to thinking about a professional news network that allows you as a journalist, or your institution, to have access not only to Reuters material, but to a variety of other potentially more specialised information about sport or entertainment, or other areas where we are never going to be as good as someone else.”

At the same time, he said, this network would allow news organisations “to take content that you already paid to produce once, and you already monetised, and see if there’s another market for it in a non-competitive way”.

“Creating that network is going to be the future for us.”

Ahearn said the company made these investments because last year’s doldrums would not last.

“Advertising’s not dead,” he said. “We had a tough year, and advertising was down across the world, but advertising is not going to dry up in the media experience. In some areas of the world, we are going to see growth, like India, China, and despite a bit of a retrenchment here [the Middle East] over the last year, I bet growth comes back.”

A Staff Benevolent and Welfare Fund (later renamed Reuters Centenary Fund) was established on 7 March 1951 with a transfer from the Pension Fund Reserve and a supplementary grant authorised by the board to mark the company’s centenary celebrations. Its purpose is to deal with special cases of hardship affecting staff members and pensioners and their dependents.